Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) (8 page)

The dinghy overtook me in a swirling circle, round and round, trapping me in a wall of foam. The craft moved faster and faster. The engine howled like a wounded beast. Then the motor died, the roar ended and the night grew still. The dinghy slowed, bobbing on the tide, the wake pushing us together and I took a grip on the rope looped along the side. It had been a long swim, a long day. I was tired.

The sheikh’s features were sharp in the moon’s glow. He wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t angry. He seemed ponderous as he glanced towards La Gomera. I did the same. He was looking towards the bar with dim yellow lights at one end of the beach. Shadows. Tourists. People like me. With the motor silent now, I could hear the beat of music, the tune familiar. As I looked back at the sheikh, he stretched out his hand and, for the first time since I left my towel on the sand and dived into the sea, I had control over my own destiny.

T
HE DINGHY BOUNCED OVER
the waves, gaining speed as we rounded the coast and entered the bay. The sheikh raised the propeller at the last moment and I was thrown forward as the inflatable ploughed into the sand. He had stared at the sea ahead from the moment I hauled myself on board and, when he cut the engine, the sudden calm was like the stillness before the storm.

‘Are you OK?’ I said stupidly. He didn’t acknowledge that I’d spoken.

The Arabs were sitting in a line outside the fishing shed in the glow of an oil lamp. They were waiting without talking, the blaze from their cigarettes like fireflies briefly lighting their faces before thrusting them back into darkness. The sky was clear. It was as if time was standing still, that my following the sheikh into the dunes had never happened, that kiss, the long swim, the blue bursts of summer lightning, the glimpse of life on La Gomera like something seen in a dream. Only the moon turning yellow and lowering in the sky marked the course of the night.

I adjusted the sarong the sheikh had brought for me and stepped out of the dinghy as he made his way in restless strides up the beach. He stopped, turning to crook his finger, motioning me to follow. As I did so, he bent and grabbed a strip of cane from the same abandoned lobster trap from which the man in black had armed himself to beat me. A tingle ran across my bottom. The pain had gone but my memory was still smarting.

The men shuffled to their feet, their shadows elongated by the diffused light of the lamp. The sheikh tapped the sand with the tip of the cane as he spoke, his voice soft and melodious as if he were reciting poetry. When he gestured towards the boat, the three sailors he had arrived with grabbed the sacks lying on the sand, made their way down the beach and waded through the tide.

The sheikh glanced at the beachcomber and spat out a single word that sent the man scurrying off back into the shed. He returned with an enamel cup filled with water. The sheikh was about to quench his thirst but stopped himself as the cup was about to touch his lips. He placed the cup in the bowl of my hands and, as our eyes met, the crescents of light mirrored in his gaze were like flames heating the night air. My pulse raced. My underarms were damp. I had that feeling you have in a school play just before you go out on stage. I looked down at the cup and found the moon floating on the surface of the water. I drained every last drop and the beachcomber refilled it again for the sheikh.

No more words were said. The beach was an amphitheatre. I was a part of the drama, but unsure of my role, my character, the arc of my journey. I looked out to sea. The sailors had balanced the sacks on their heads and were about to board the boat. I glanced back at the man in black. He had remained silent, shoulders hunched, hands loose at his sides. The sheikh dropped the cup when he had finished drinking, the water that remained draining into the sand.

He then turned to the man in black, eyes blazing, teeth clenched. I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck as the sheikh raised the cane above his head and brought it down across the other man’s arm. The man flinched, his mouth fell open and he gasped for air. He didn’t cry out, he didn’t move, he didn’t defend himself. That man had whacked me five times, five fork-tongued lashes that branded my bare flesh. He had slapped my breasts and bent me over the rubber side of the Zodiac to take me like a wild beast in rut.

Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me.

I felt ashamed and I felt confused. That man had inflicted pain on me, but still it was horrifying to watch as the sheikh beat him again and again, slashing at his arms and legs, one side then the other, one stroke after the other, the bamboo singing as it sliced through the air, the two figures in the moonlight silhouettes in a lantern theatre, one in black, one in white, their movements oddly mechanical, the cane climbing into the air, the man in black shrinking away as the two figures fused together just as the bomber pilot and the bomb he drops from 50,000 feet connects him to the people in the villages and schools and hospitals on the ground below.

The man turned, his black turban slowly unwound, falling like a dead cat to the sand, and the cane came down in a series of vicious swipes against his back.

One, two, three, four, five times …

He fell to his knees.

…six, seven, eight …

‘No. No. No more,’ I cried.

The night stood still.

The sheikh turned and stared at me. He looked angry, puzzled, uncertain. I had disturbed the ritual. He turned away and struck the man in black again, three more times, three hard concentrated blows before he tossed the cane back on the sand.

He marched down the beach and I followed as a wife would follow her man from the pub after a brawl. He dragged the inflatable off the hard sand, fired the motor and lowered the propeller. He stared into my eyes, his face taut with tension. Once more he was giving me a choice and, just as I had chosen not to swim on to La Gomera, again it was with my own free will that I stepped into the dinghy. The sheikh pushed the craft from shore and slipped across the rubber hull, accelerating without a word towards the boat.

I glanced back, just as I had glanced back from the tower earlier that day, and watched the past recede.

How did I feel at that moment? I felt bewildered, impulsive, terrified and I felt reborn. I felt like the newly hatched butterfly seeing the world for the first time. My shoulders were bent from being imprisoned inside the cocoon and, as I stretched, I was aware of my wings growing, forming, sprouting feathers. They were fragile, of many colours, slowly unfurling, and I didn’t know if my wings were going to take me high into the sky or whether I was destined to plunge disastrously back down to earth. The baby bird doesn’t know how to fly when it leaves the nest, it flies on instinct. I had been given the chance to go back, not once but twice, and felt certain, even now, that had I slipped over the side of the white dinghy the sheikh wouldn’t have stopped me swimming away.

He turned off the engine, raised the propeller and we bounced against the hull of the boat. My fingers went unconsciously for the St Christopher at my throat, a gesture that belonged to my mother, and I thought of her wearing gardening gloves, trimming the roses, looking up from under the brim of her straw hat, the sun behind her, her wide face with my own green eyes full of mystery and secrets. I didn’t know my mother. I didn’t know myself.

The sheikh threw a line up to one of his men and reached for the rope ladder. There are few moments in life when we are faced with great decisions. When I reached the halfway point on my swim to the island from La Gomera may have been one of those times. This was another. I knew I would regret it if I didn’t leave with the sheikh and, at the same time, I knew I was taking an unimaginable risk, that far greater regrets might be waiting in my future.

I stood. When I took his arm to balance myself, he flinched as if my fingers burned and it occurred to me at that moment that he too might be taking a risk, that this young man who appeared to wield such power might be subject to some greater authority, that taking white girls south to nowhere may not be the most sensible thing to do.

Why did he want me? I didn’t know and it is the unknown that drove me on. Our eyes met for a second and he looked away as I shuffled the sarong up my thighs. I climbed the ladder and stepped on deck, disturbing the pair of seagulls on the rail at the stern. The air filled with the beat of their wings and I watched them sweep over the sea, cackling noisily until they vanished from view. The anchor chain groaned as it ground its way around the pulley. The diesel engines thumped, the moon was at eye level off the starboard side as we moved into the night.

The boat was a patchwork of ancient timbers held together with sheets of steel. We travelled at a leisurely pace, the sound of the engines muted below sea level, no louder than the beat of my heart. The breeze combed the knots from my hair as I watched the island disappear, consumed by the black swell of the sea.

Though I had chosen to follow the sheikh, now I was standing on the deck of that dilapidated vessel, I paused again to wonder what madness had urged me to do so. I had passed my exams. I had a job. Friends.
Contacts
. I moved in charmed circles. The young, the gorgeous, the privileged. I am a Pisces, a good swimmer, prone to opposites, moving in two directions at once, not unerringly cautious, but I wasn’t impetuous either. So much had happened that day, it was like many days, weeks and months condensed into one gulp of time I didn’t want to end.

Every second from the moment the beachcomber found me like a conch shell on the sands had been vibrant with new and disparate experiences, fear, of course, but incredulity, too, my shame and humiliation set against a lewd and promiscuous pleasure –
so Piscean!
I had detested being naked before the eyes of strangers, but was aware of that feeling transforming during the day into an immodest sense of daring, a sense that I was doing something that I had always secretly wanted to do. Lurking in my subconscious was the notion that all women want to be seen undressed, taken against their will, that pure satisfaction comes from impure desires.

I could rightly claim that everything that had happened to me until the moment I climbed the rope ladder on to the boat had been against my will: my mouth and vagina being used as a receptacle for the abusers’ semen, the spanking, the beating, even kissing the sheikh was only a subterfuge in my plan of escape. The wanton side of Pisces was in the ascendant and my caution must have flown away with the seagulls I’d watched abandon ship.

I could recall a thousand and one days walking along the Fulham Road feeling bored, fatigued, lost, my heels clacking, my fingers reaching for my top as it slid from one shoulder then the other, the breeze lifting my skirt, each movement displaying little slices of bare flesh as if I were a book jacket tempting the browser to open the covers and reveal the nude girl within.

Do girls with their clothes carelessly slipping from their bodies know what they are doing? Of course. We are told to expose ourselves by magazines, the movies, the giant hoardings on the sides of buses promoting perfume and knickers are a form of mind control whispering constantly flatten your tummy, push out your breasts, wiggle your bum, take off your clothes, open your legs, dress is nothing but the sensual aroma of the latest scent. In PR we create false hopes and dreams, a chimerical world full of laughter and stripped of that deep-seated feeling that there are better times to be had if we just have the courage to break the bonds of the life we are living. I never made my own decisions, not really, not until that moment.

The sheikh moved around the deck, checking something or other. Each time our eyes met he looked away. I wasn’t exactly sure why he had beaten the man in black, but I was somewhere in the mix of his anger and emotions. The sheikh smuggled Africans to Europe, and he could of course just as easily now have been smuggling me to Africa. People are commodities. In a free market everything has its price. And I was sure that, like tiger skins and rhinoceros horns, white girls like me carried a premium. Perhaps that was why the sheikh had punished the other man, for damaging property. His property.

When the sheikh had finished his spurious inspection, he beckoned and I followed as he gave me a tour of the boat. It was larger once you were on board than it had appeared from shore. At the bow, the wheelhouse was crudely made from weathered planks of wood. There was one long low cabin with portholes above the level of the deck and, below decks, was the open hold that, over the years, would have served to carry fish and other goods, the scattering of discarded blankets evidence that its primary use today was human cargo.

We climbed back up the narrow stairs, the sheikh shouted an order to one of the sailors and we entered the cabin. I was surprised to find myself in a boudoir opulent with silks and satins in pastel colours made exotic with the rich aroma of incense. Below my feet was an intricately woven carpet and around the walls were big cushions hemmed with golden tassels. I made my way through the clouds of chiffon suspended from the ceiling and wondered why they were hanging there, what purpose they served other than to make the cabin appear like a room in a palace, a floating harem, a place for lovers. There were divans, a chest of drawers, low tables of carved wood, copper cups and bowls, tall lamps that he lit and in the reflection of the round mirror I saw a blonde girl with wild eyes and an expression just as hard to read as the man in white standing just behind her.

In my sarong with the St Christopher glittering on the chain around my neck, I felt like Scheherazade from
One Thousand and One Nights
, a book I had read with rapt passion as a teenager. Scheherazade was dreamy, doe-eyed, ethereal but it was through guile alone that she survived the terrible curse of the Cuckolded Sultan in a story of treachery, vengeance and sex that had captured my young imagination.

It was long ago in ancient Persia when the Sultan returned victorious from battle only to find his wife entwined in the arms of another man. They were instantly executed, but the punishment wasn’t enough to assuage the Sultan’s wounded pride. He had come to believe that every woman was guilty of his wife’s betrayal and took long and gory revenge. Every day for three thousand days he married a virgin, and every morning at daybreak his bride was beheaded. The people lived in fear and the kingdom became barren and impoverished.

Scheherazade lived in the environs of the palace where her father was an official. The Sultan had watched her grow up and at that exquisite moment when the child like a flower was budding with the curves and contours of a woman, he asked for her hand. Scheherazade knew what had happened to all the girls before her but still, against her father’s wishes, consented to the marriage. Scheherazade had a plan and enlisted her sister’s help.

After the ceremony, on the way to the bed chamber, she asked if she could bid farewell to her young sister. The Sultan, delighted with his prize, agreed and, when the girl arrived, she asked Scheherazade to tell her a story. The Sultan stretched out indulgently on his divan to listen. The tale his bride told had many twists and surprises and, when she had finished, the Sultan was so intrigued, he asked for another story.